The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  Both Milowka and Harris had consulted and stunt-dived for James Cameron’s 3-D disaster film Sanctum, loosely based on an ill-fated expedition to Nullarbor in 1988. A team of fifteen divers, led by veteran Australian caver Andrew Wight, had plunged in about five hundred yards when it started to pour. A freak storm pummeled the area with two years’ worth of rain. Wight and a teammate managed to scamper out as boulders rained down and closed the once-gaping cave mouth. He then helped spearhead the twenty-seven-hour rescue effort to save the rest of his team. The screenplay of Sanctum, based on this experience, was cowritten by Wight.

  That scenario wasn’t so dissimilar from the rains that choked off Tham Luang: the main difference is that while the exact timing of northern Thailand’s rains is unpredictable—like the storm that clobbered Nullarbor—Tham Luang’s annual submergence is something you can bet on.

  Even though there was no doubt that Harris’s background as an anesthesiologist made him uniquely qualified to help in this situation, there was no template for sedating humans and then ferrying them through a mile of submerged cavern. The closest thing to a precedent anyone could think of involved animals. Research had been conducted on the sedation of wild pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, elephant seals, etc.) off the coast of California. The animals had been shot with sedative darts in order for scientists to temporarily capture the feisty creatures and conduct blood tests and ultrasounds. Ketamine, a common animal tranquilizer and once the gold standard of anesthetics in pediatric medicine, was most commonly used. After being darted, the animals would bolt into the water. The scientists noticed that even when the animals were unconscious in the water, they maintained their diving reflex—which prevented them from gulping seawater into their lungs.

  The divers and doctors at Tham Luang hoped that the use of ketamine on the boys might work as it had with the pinnipeds, and that perhaps if the boys’ masks flooded their own diving reflexes would kick in. But again, this was only a theory. It had never been properly tested by researchers on humans. It was an enormous leap of logic, and the team knew it was a gamble. Pinnipeds are what is called obligate nasal breathers, meaning they breathe only through their noses, and have been evolutionarily perfected for prolonged dives and breath-holding. Millions of years of adaptation to underwater survival have endowed them with a much higher tolerance for carbon dioxide in their systems—the buildup of which the brain detects when it sends signals to the diaphragm to contract, thus pulling fresh air into the lungs. Humans are not built for prolonged submarine exposure and have a far lower tolerance for carbon dioxide, and when we gasp for air, we do it through our mouths.

  If there are any pleasant ways to die, drowning is not one of them. The carbon dioxide in your body triggers those contractions of the diaphragm, and a sensation of being choked overwhelms you, as if death itself is gripping your throat and clutching your lungs. Some feel a stabbing sensation in their eyes and ears, and then there’s the involuntary opening of the mouth—maybe to scream, maybe to breathe air that turns out to be water. Once the lungs fill, your buoyancy is lost and you sink. Death follows quickly and mercifully.

  In recent decades free divers have expanded our understanding of the human body’s tolerance for the immense pressures of the deep. On a single breath, free divers have reached depths of over seven hundred feet—nearly as far as Challen dove on rebreathers. Lungs shrink to one-twentieth of their normal size and something amazing happens: the mammalian dive reflex kicks in. Heart rates slow by over 25 percent, and even as blood rushes to the internal organs to keep the diver alive, they typically don’t lose consciousness even when their heart rates slow to about fifteen beats a minute (most people’s hearts beat between sixty and eighty times per minute). But this happens at great depths, among divers who have trained to control their breathing and heart rates as well as yogis. It’s not something the boys could have done—besides, their challenge wasn’t depth, it was horizontal distance.

  In the end, the concept of sedation remained controversial. While the arrival of Harris and Challen at the cave had been okayed by the Thai government, there was no definite plan for them. In fact, no one even knew whether the Thai government would allow a rescue operation to occur in the first place, let alone one that involved sedating twelve children and a coach. Harris and Challen had made the four-thousand-mile trip from Australia to Thailand in the hope that they’d be able to do some good in the next few days, but no one knew if they’d even be allowed to suit up for the mission.

  Even as their plan continued to coalesce—as Thursday, July 5, slipped into Friday, July 6—the international teams’ sense of dread grew. The monsoons were only a weather system away, and they couldn’t get the Thai SEALs to focus on anything but their oxygen hose. The USAF Special Tactics team and the British, in particular, felt they had to set the rescue in motion, and they had to do it immediately—but hadn’t been able to pitch their plan to a decision maker. With the arrival of Harris and Challen, they now had six total divers (four Brits and two Aussies) with the chops to haul inert 70- to 150-pound sacks of human beings through fifteen hundred yards of underwater terror. Harris was to be the main doctor back in Chamber Nine. Challen was to provide medical support along the way. That left four primary rescue divers for thirteen people. The four Thai Navy SEALs who had been with the kids would have to dive out on their own power; it was decided they would neither assist in the rescue nor receive assistance from rescuers on their way out. During their initial planning session, the Brits and the U.S. Special Ops team had already ruled out extracting all the boys in a single day. The divers expected it would take them about eight to ten hours to swim to the boys and ferry them back out. They said they would need about sixteen hours downtime after each rescue. At that pace it could take four days.

  Hodges and his team started to get nervous. They knew major rain was expected after the weekend, as much or more than the rains that had swamped the cave a week before and had triggered the all-out evacuation and suspension of all dive activity.

  In their tent, Hodges relayed his concerns not only to his team but up the command chain as well: “If we don’t get this plan briefed and approved and everybody on board, we’re probably not gonna be able to execute it, especially if we’re gonna try to start doing it Monday or Tuesday. This is gonna be a huge effort. It’s going to require a lot of prestaging in between each day and relocating equipment.”

  Outside the cave on July 6, Hodges and Anderson were lobbying for action. While the plan still wasn’t firmly drawn up, they had a pretty good sketch of what the Rube Goldberg rescue would look like. What they lacked were supporters. That day they spoke to the Thai SEALs, recalled Hodges: “Hey—this piping in oxygen is absolutely your guys’ mission. If that’s what you wanna do, then we understand. But we don’t think that that’s a long-term solution.” As it turned out, the SEALs had come to a similar assessment: after Saman Gunan’s drowning, they quietly wrapped up their plan to lay an oxygen pipe through the cave; it was too complicated and clearly too risky.

  The Americans knew they were days from being forced to maroon the children to a possibly gruesome death, and while they believed the SEALs also grasped the gravity of the situation, that message had apparently not been communicated to the military’s decision makers. In the U.S. military, a commanding general would typically have the authority to make the tactical decisions necessary to execute the mission he’d been assigned. But the tactical decisions determining almost every facet of the cave rescue in little Mae Sai were being made by the political hierarchy in Bangkok. It was by no means ideal.

  “Was there frustration? Absolutely,” said Anderson. “I don’t think we were frustrated with any one individual. We were frustrated by the process of having to go up to the highest, highest levels. And I also think that there was a disconnect between what they thought the severity of the situation was at the highest levels and what was actually happening down at the tactical level.”

  Approval or not, the internationa
l team had to keep pushing its preparations, and by July 6, they were well under way. A day earlier, the Americans had assigned the so-called Euro-divers—Claus Rasmussen, Ivan Karadzic, Mikko Paasi, Nick Vollmar, and Erik Brown—to help with provisioning the route and tidying it up. The Euro-divers’ first mission that day was to find a safe spot somewhere before the T-junction to stash fresh air tanks. Basically, they were to set up a gas station at a midpoint of their choosing along the waterway between Chambers Three and Nine. They would leave fresh tanks and diving equipment such as regulators for the Brits and Aussies shuttling back and forth. It wasn’t particularly glamorous work; it wasn’t particularly easy, either.

  They had been tasked with taking three extra tanks each, to amass a cache of twelve. The packs of three air tanks they were to deliver deeper into the cave were waiting for them at Chamber Three. Surprisingly, given all they’d heard about the conditions in the water, they coasted at first. The Euro-divers had been told by Ben Reymenants to leave their fins at home. The current was so strong they wouldn’t need them—they’d be using their hands to crawl and pull their way through. Now the current had eased and the going was smooth. They devised a system in which they lashed their tanks into a three-pack, wedged with Styrofoam to prevent the tanks from dragging on the bottom. On solid ground they weighed about a hundred pounds; in the water it felt like they weighed only a couple of pounds.

  Claus Rasmussen, the other Dane on the team and the unofficial leader, headed in first. He had been confused by their orders. Rasmussen recalls at least three distinctly different sets of orders that day, a couple of which had him heading in first to clear debris, telephone and electrical lines, and remnants of the ill-fated oxygen tube that had been abandoned. The Thais at the sump in Chamber Three told him not to bother, but he figured he might as well take a peek and try it anyway.

  He wormed his way past the sump at Chamber Three and worked through the tangle of lines. He dropped down low toward the gravel at the cave bottom to perform his housekeeping assignment, winding the loose wires around his forearm, cutting off sections, and then discarding them in nooks behind rocks. As he was working he could feel other divers come past. The first one to glide by he knew to be Paasi. Then another figure passed, closer to him. Rasmussen felt his own hand jerk in the direction of the diver. He could feel the cable on his arm start to unspool as the diver swam past. He immediately let go, hoping that whatever it was getting tangled around was not the metal part of the diver’s rebreather. As soon as the wire was out of his hands he swam after the diver to warn him. It didn’t take long to reach the diver—he could see that it was Vollmar and could hear that the wire had become tangled around his breathing apparatus. Vollmar switched to his backup scuba tank with an open-circuit regulator (the kind that lets out bubbles when one breathes instead of recycling them as a rebreather does).

  Hovering in the tunnel, Vollmar was fiddling with his rebreather and trying to untangle the wire—but it was hopelessly ensnared. He wrestled with it for a few minutes, then made a decision and started unclipping the three tanks he was transporting and resetting them on the guideline. He was bailing out. He had plenty of air in his extra tank to get back, but clearly not enough to complete the mission—especially while encumbered with a broken rebreather. Rasmussen gave him the okay sign and clipped Vollmar’s three tanks onto his own harness. Later that day Vollmar spent a couple of hours tinkering with his gear, but it was wrecked and he was out for the rest of the rescue. Shaking his head at the memory, Rasmussen said that if it had happened deeper in the cave it might have been disastrous.

  Paasi had been at the head of the small procession of four divers, oblivious to the near disaster in the line behind him. At the mouth of the cave he’d been given instructions; after the tight restriction past Chamber Three—a 150-yard-long crawl space littered with electrical cables from the first few days of the dive—he would come to a junction at the start of Chamber Four. To him it looked like a fork in the road, though he didn’t know that both routes eventually would converge. He had the option of taking a left or a right. He was told to take a right. When he arrived at the junction, he decided to wait for the other divers to catch up. But minute by minute he grew more disoriented. He didn’t know that Vollmar’s rebreather malfunction had held up the line. Floating in the dark, the minutes dragging on, Paasi looked at his hands and noticed that even with his headlights shining directly on them the tips of his fingers seemed to dissolve into the brown plasma of the water. Paasi kept a thumb pointed at the exit, but “the dark plays tricks on your mind.” This was a section of cave that would lead to another potentially fatal incident four days later, when it would matter most.

  In the dark, spinning around for a while, his three choices looked identical: forward to the boys, back to the exit, or the turn into a dead end. There was no way to orient himself, so he just clung to the rope. Finally the next diver came and pointed him in the right direction. It was his first lesson in the treacherousness of the cave.

  Minutes later, Karadzic got stuck in a restriction. He eventually wiggled his way out, but he found the experience instructive. Most divers follow a line close to the bottom. Divers swim horizontally, their faces looking toward the floor and the guideline beneath them. Lifting one’s neck to look forward or up is not only difficult, but is sometimes made impossible by the dive valves and hoses on their back-mounted tanks. But the guideline that had been set up in the cave was high and loose. Its slack would allow it to roam more than three feet in one direction or another in a tunnel, potentially stuffing a diver face-first into a restriction or unseen wall. It also required the divers to choreograph moving the trio of tanks they towed from one hand to the other, while ensuring the line lashed to the tanks didn’t snag on the main guideline. It was like walking several unruly dogs on loose leashes.

  The team managed to find their “gas station” before the T-junction, at nearly the exact geographical midpoint between the boys and the mouth of the cave, and started unloading their tanks. This would become known as Chamber Six, and while Karadzic and Erik Brown didn’t it know it yet, they’d be spending a lot of time there. Over the next four days they would make as many trips as they could handle, ferrying in more than one hundred air tanks; in the course of these trips they became so familiar with the cave’s turns, dips, and lacerating edges that they could have navigated it blindfolded. They were to prove invaluable stevedores: no one else in camp—other than the British foursome and the Aussie doctors—had the experience necessary to stockpile all those tanks.

  After that first dive, the Euro-divers trooped out exhausted. One of the U.S. Special Ops team’s captains, Mitch Torrel, came to Karadzic with a big blue tarp.

  “Hey—anything you need to take in to Chamber Three, we’ll haul in for you,” said Torrel.

  And for the next five days, the Special Ops team—elite soldiers trained at the cost of millions of dollars each—would crawl, pull, and carry hundreds of pounds of other people’s gear into Chamber Three. It would be neatly set up for the divers when they arrived.

  Now all they needed was an approved mission that would put those supplies to use.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sticking Your Neck Out

  They needed to get the Thai government on board.

  On Friday, July 6, getting the green light from the Thai government became the Americans’ primary focus. The effort had begun with Anderson’s conversation with the Thai Navy SEALs that day, but that conversation was only the beginning. Until then, the details of the proposed rescue operation had not been discussed seriously among the top leaders in camp. That was because the American team planning the operation had been unable to get an audience with the decision makers. They had to find a way to break through the bureaucracy, and in the end, this ultimately required a bit of serendipity in the form of an American rock climber named Josh Morris.

  Morris had bailed on a trip to the United States to volunteer at the cave site. He was a sinewy mountain
climber who had lived in Thailand for seventeen years, married a local woman, had four kids with her, and possessed a voice that could easily have made him Nicolas Cage’s voice double. He had founded Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures about fifteen years earlier and played a significant role in developing rock climbing in Thailand. Before the boys went missing, he’d planned to go back stateside for a grand tour during the last week in June—a wedding, his father’s eightieth birthday, a reunion with grade-school buddies. It didn’t happen, because he had sent his Chiang Mai climbing team to volunteer at the cave site. After a few days he followed.

  As the days leading up to the big family trip to the U.S. neared, he finally broke the news to his kids. His five-year-old daughter, Kamine, cried—she’d been looking forward to playing with her cousin Ariel, and had been preparing by repeatedly watching The Little Mermaid. And then Josh did what daddies do—he exaggerated: “These boys want to go see their mommies and daddies, too, and if you can help me support that, maybe we can make that happen.” In truth, he didn’t know if he’d play any role at all in the rescue.

  By July 6, it had become pretty clear that there wasn’t much reason for Morris to be there. Indeed, he’d been on site for a week or so and spent most of that time wandering around the camp and the hills looking for something worthwhile to do. Most of the efforts of Morris and the rope-climbing experts from his company—including Taw, who was among the first to the cave, and Mario Wild—had been devoted to finding an alternative entrance to the cave. While the divers had been discovering the kids and devising a plan to dive them out, Morris’s group had continued helping the Thai military sniff out the mountain above the cave for shafts that could connect to the underground passage, each time coming back empty-handed.